


Five for Silver

by ishafel



Series: Same Old Story [5]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Alpha/Omega, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, M/M, Mpreg, Post Mpreg, Post-Reichenbach
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-08
Updated: 2019-07-08
Packaged: 2020-06-24 16:12:20
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,473
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19727155
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ishafel/pseuds/ishafel
Summary: Being a real omega is harder than it looks.





	Five for Silver

**Author's Note:**

> Please note that while I have opted not to use detailed tags/ warnings at this time, all parts of this story may contain dubcon/ noncon (not main pairing), pregnancy/ miscarriage/ abortion, illness, mental illness, violence, and human rights violations. Et cetera.

He’s never been shot until Syria. It’s every bit as shitty and painful as you’d think. Everything about Syria is shitty and painful, which he expects, and most of it is boring, which he doesn’t.

Rafiq Shakur examines Seb head to toe, exactly the way his ancestors probably examined the filthy camels they traded, and dismisses him. “Muhammed al-Zahar told me you were a beauty,” he says, “lithe and delicate as a desert flower at an oasis.” He spits on the ground at Seb’s feet. “He must have been senile in his last days. Still, if the child you carry is a girl, and healthy, I will marry her to my son for the sake of my old friend.”

Seb stares at the flagged stone of the courtyard, and is glad that Fleur’s baby is a boy. Please God, let it be an alpha as well, safe from the greedy hands of men like this.

“Tell me your name, slave.”

“Ya Kalb is this one’s name, Sheikh,” he says, making it not a name as Mycroft had, but a slur, hoping his annoyance passes for fear.

“I believe a new name is in order,” Rafiq Shakur says. “Perhaps-- Ya Sharmouta.” It means whore-bitch, which Seb actually prefers to Yakalb. “Take Sharmouta to my mother.”

Rafiq Shakur’s young wives and his children are safe in Yemen. Here in Damascus, his mother rules his harem, and the other women are slaves. She is tiny, ancient, wrinkled, but her eyes are dark and sharp. Alpha. Seb drops his own eyes at once. Alpha females are nearly as rare in this part of the world as omega males, and the things she must have done, must have endured--.

“Ya Sharmouta,” she croons, and grips his chin with strong taloned fingers. Seb doesn’t have to pretend to the panic he feels. And then in English, “Circassian bitch-whore with your big belly, you will not have my son or my grandson.” 

He doesn’t react, gives no sign that he understands the words at all, and after a moment she lets him go. “Find him a bed,” she says to one of the other women, “and let him serve in the kitchen and at the table. It is not as if the men will touch him, eh, Sharmouta?”

Seb sleeps on a pile of straw in a corner. He eats last of all, after all of the others are finished, and he washes last, with whatever water is left at the end of the day, because as a male omega, and pregnant, he is unclean twice over. He does the chores they set him, with as much grace as he can muster, and he serves the food, mute and quick as he can manage. And they talk in front of him, as if he truly were a dog.

He goes to bed hungry, and wakes stiff, and there are fleabites on his legs. But by the third day, when he’s scheduled to meet his contact, he has the first hazy details of their plan memorized. In the dark he runs his fingers over the collar, over and over, as he says them to himself.

The women are barely aware of him; only Farrah, the youngest at thirteen-- and almost eight months pregnant-- has ever looked his way. It is no trouble, when they go to the fountain for water, to slip away down an alley and piss against the wall. And if there is a beggar there, an old man wrapped in rags and sunk into a corner, he is only Sharmouta, bitch-whore, and he has no modesty to protect. He talks while he pisses, and when he finishes, Mycroft’s agent clasps a copper bracelet around his wrist, no different outwardly than the others he wears, and shows Seb the trigger. “When it comes off,” he says, “we come in hot. We’ll be there in force in under five minutes. You know who was very clear about that.”

“Thank you,” Seb says as he goes. It will all be over in a week, and he’ll be home before Isobel has time to miss him properly. Hell, Watson might not even notice he’s been gone.

It doesn’t work out that way. The Americans bomb a field hospital near Aleppo, and kill half a dozen civilians; Daesh retaliates by capturing and executing a dozen American soldiers near the Lebanese border, and suddenly the roads into Damascus are choked with roadblocks. No one’s bringing in the truckload of guns they were waiting for. 

For nine days nothing happens, and Seb starts to think nothing will. And then he brings coffee to Rafiq Shakur, late at night, and he hears the man Rafiq Shakur is meeting call him Rafi Khan. 

Six years ago Seb waited in a car outside a bar in Marrakech while Jim sold biological weapons to a man named Rafi Khan. They’ve been operating under the assumption that Rafiq Shakur is just a local warlord, a comparatively small fish, albeit one with dangerous connections. Rafi Khan-- if they are the same person-- is something else entirely, and Seb wonders if Mycroft knows, if he sent Seb in blind, and why.

For sure Seb’s fucking lucky Rafi Khan didn’t do business with omegas, because if they’d met in Morocco it would have been hard to explain how Seb’d gone from being Jim Moriarty’s right hand to being al-Zahar’s whore.

When they go for water the next day, he ducks away into the alley and tells the agent everything. Let Mycroft sort it out. Seb hates espionage even more than he thought he would. He misses the simplicity of a rifle. There’s no fish so big you can’t shoot it. Only, of course, if Rafiq Shakur is Rafi Khan, Rafi Khan of les agents biologiques in the cafe in Morocco, shooting him will probably make things a thousand times worse.

“Tell Mycroft I need you to bring me some fucking protein bars next time or something,” he says when he’s finished. They gave him some kind of vitamin shot before he left England, so the baby should be okay, but Seb’s _hungry_. He’s spent most of his life in the British Army, where even if the food isn’t good, there’s always plenty of it.

The others are already at the fountain by the time he catches up this time. “Slow, Sharmouta,” Fatima, who is Rafiq Shakur’s current favorite, says coldly. She’s only an omega, and so Seb just nods and doesn’t look away. But he still ends up carrying twice as much water as anyone else.

The midwife comes later that day and checks both him and Farrah. Her hands are cool and gentle and she smiles encouragingly when she tells him that he and the baby are healthy. Her fae is much graver when she finishes Farrah’s examination. “She is very small, and the child is breech,” she tells Rafiq Shakur’s mother. “And even if she delivers safely, I am not sure there will be enough milk--.”

“That one will have milk,” the old witch says, staring grimly at Seb. “He is a cow, all dull eyes and big hips and big breasts, omega bitch whore with his cow-eyed baby growing in his belly. al-Zahar told my son he bears well and breeds true, but he had best bear a girl and not a little sharmouta.” She spits on the clean tiled floor and turns away.

Seb sweeps and pretends not to hear. He’s not having his baby, Fleur’s baby, in this hellhole. He’s having him in a proper English hospital, and he’s having a fucking epidural first.

The next time in the alley, the agent presses a handful of granola bars and a couple of beef jerky sticks into Seb’s hand. “It won’t be long now,” he says. Seb’s too distracted by the thought of meat to react. He’s spent most of his adult life eating army rations; the food’s never been gourmet but it was never scarce either. He’d kill for an MRE right about now, even the sausage biscuit one that Collins had insisted was made with Spam.

Before whatever Mycroft means to happen, happens, Farrah goes into labor. Someone-- Aliyah, perhaps, or Fatima, shakes him awake in the early hours of the morning and orders him to boil water. All through that endless, stifling day he fetches cups of tea and coffee that no one drinks, and grimly drinks cup after cup of the stuff the midwife says will bring his milk on early, if Farrah should die and the baby should live.

Rafiq Shakur is gone, and all the men of the house but Seb gone with him. 

He wishes he was gone as well. He’s seen children die before, but never so slowly and so painfully. He is not sure who he blames most-- Rafi Khan, who could have gotten her to a doctor if he chose to; Ahmed Farr, who raped her; Mycroft Holmes, who has tied Seb’s hands so that there is nothing to do but wait.

She dies at sunset, and the baby never draws a breath. It’s Seb’s job to wash her and wrap her body for burial. Afterwards he slinks away into the courtyard and sits under the olive tree in the dark, looking up at the waning moon through the branches and wondering what the fuck he’s doing here, when he could be home with Isobel. Someone loved Farrah once, maybe, someone fought to keep her safe. Maybe she wasn’t always just an omega female, to be traded as Yakalb had been, for guns, for food or water or the illusion of safety. He hopes that she had a chance to be a child, at least for a little while.

He’s half asleep when he hears Rafiq Shakur returning, the Land Cruiser followed by the familiar roar of the Nissan truck with its missing exhaust pipe. He doesn’t move. The Land Cruiser stops in the front by the broken fountain where it’s always parked, but the Nissan pulls around to the back, into the crumbling stables. After a moment someone gets out and trots back to shut and lock the gates. Mohammed. 

Seb waits, sniper quiet, while they admire the contents of the truck and then carefully drag a tarp over it. They leave Faisal on guard. Within the hour he’s asleep, squatting propped against the wall in a ring of cigarette butts. Seb has no trouble at all getting by him, even though he feels more like a calving whale than James Bond these days. 

He draws back the tarp, squinting in the dim grayness. He isn’t sure what he’s expecting-- cases of AKs and grenades, a cooler full of anthrax, a pile of human heads, a rocket launcher. What it is, is a nuclear warhead, American-made and still in its original crate. Seb covers it again, carefully, and checks to be sure that Faisal is still snoring gently.

He could use the bracelet, but Mycroft will want to know what Rafi Khan means to do with the warhead, and where he got it. He should wait-- maybe-- he is still thinking about it as he slips quietly into the house and makes his way to the harem. His hand is on the door handle when the door opens and Rafiq Shakur steps out, with Ahmed at his heels. They have been to see Farrah’s body, or the baby’s; Ahmed’s eyes are red from weeping and even Rafiq Shakur seems a little grimmer than normal, though to the best of Seb’s knowledge he hadn’t known Farrah, not really.

It is hard to say who is the most surprised. Seb spends fifteen seconds thinking of a plausible excuse before he decides there probably isn’t one. Instead he drops his eyes to the ground and starts past. What would a proper omega like Yakalb be thinking now? Probably that he doesn’t want to be beaten. Which is fair enough; Seb doesn’t want to be beaten either. He tries to make himself as small and submissive as possible.

Just as he thinks he’s clear, Rafiq Shakur catches him by the bicep, hard. “Where have you been, Ya Sharmouta?” he asks.

“ This one was taken ill,” he says. “This one only wanted some air, please--.”

The other man hits him, hard but open-handed, and Seb doesn’t have to pretend to cringe. Ahmed looks away in disgust, but Rafiq Shakur only drags him from the harem through the dark house to the office. “The truth, Sharmouta,” he says.

Seb’s cheek is already swelling. “This one does not understand,” he says. He can’t get at the fucking bracelet from this angle, not with one hand. 

“Do you know,” Rafiq Shakur says, “I find it difficult to believe that you ever lived in Muhammed’s household, much less found yourself in his bed. Are you even an omega, Sharmouta?” And then Ahmed grabs Seb’s other arm and between them they cut his robes off.

Seb stands in front of them, barefoot, in nothing but Yakalb’s battered y-fronts, his breasts a little full and his belly six months swollen.

“Well,” Ahmed says. “So he is an omega after all.”

“And prettier with his clothes off,” Rafiq Shakur agrees. He lets go of Seb’s arm to reach for his breast, and Seb twists hard and pulls free and from there it’s easy enough to elbow Ahmed hard in the chin and grab the gun from his belt as he falls. 

He’s already clicking the safety off as he turns back to Rafi Khan, and he puts two rounds in the other man’s head and swings back to catch Ahmed just starting to get to his feet and shoots him in the throat. It’s hardly what he had in mind, but it’s going beautifully until the door behind the desk opens and fucking Mohammed, who is by far the most useless of Rafi Khan’s squad, pops up and fires approximately thirty-six shots at Seb.

Seb gets him somewhere in the vicinity of the heart, more by luck than by planning, because his left arm is suddenly useless and he’s staggering back, trying not to trip over Ahmed’s body as he wobbles to his knees. He always thought being shot was supposed to be painless at least to start with but he feels like his collarbone’s been smashed with a hammer. When he brings his right hand up to touch it his fingers come away bloody. He manages to lurch to his feet again and make it to the desk, and then he somehow shoves it forward against the closed door.

After that it’s just a matter of sliding down it to the floor. He manages to activate the bracelet and then he presses his good hand over the bullethole and closes his eyes and waits for the cavalry to come.


End file.
